Catton, Eleanor

IN BRIEF

Eleanor Catton is a fiction writer. Her first novel The Rehearsal was released in New Zealand (VUP, 2008) and the UK (Granta, 2009), and has since been translated into numerous languages. She was winner of the 2007 Sunday Star-Times short story competition, the 2008 Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship, and best first book of fiction in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2009. The Rehearsal won the UK Society of Authors' Betty Trask Award, and it was long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award and the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction. Her second novel, The Luminaries, won the 2013 Man Booker Prize.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CATTON, Eleanor (1985 - ) was born in Canada and raised in Canterbury. In 2007, she won the Sunday Star-Times short story competition, and in the same year she completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington, winning the Adam Prize in Creative Writing for her manuscript, The Rehearsal.

Eleanor Catton won the audience award at Once Upon a Deadline, a one-day story contest in the 2008 NZ International Arts Festival Writers and Readers Week, and she was awarded the 2008 Louis Johnson New Writers Bursary. Catton was the recipient of the 2008 Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship through which she attended the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her fiction has been published in a range of journals, and magazines, including Turbine, Sport and Granta.

Her first novel, The Rehearsal was published in 2008 by Victoria University Press, and by Granta (UK) in 2009. The Rehearsal received the New Zealand Society of Authors Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction at the 2009 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Louise O'Brien described Catton in NZ Listener as ‘a new talent who has arrived fully formed, with an accomplished, confident and mature voice’.

In June 2009, The Rehearsal won the UK Society of Authors' Betty Trask Award worth £8,000. The Rehearsal was also long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award. The Rehearsal has also been translated and published in Holland, France, Sweden, Norway, Italy, Spain, Germany, Israel and Brazil.

Justine Jordan wrote in The Guardian, ‘This astonishing debut novel from young New Zealander Eleanor Catton is a cause for surprise and celebration: smart, playful and self-possessed, it has the glitter and mystery of the true literary original. Though its impulses and methods can only be called experimental, the prose is so arresting, the storytelling so seductive, that wherever the book falls open it's near-impossible to put down.’

Melissa Katsoulis of the The Times comments, ‘Timeframes overlap and collide in this ingenious ontological kaleidoscope of a debut, but the experimentalism — which demands that the reader keep all her wits about her — is tempered by a real knack for narrative and a cast of painfully familiar teenage characters who are all desperate to be as confident, cool, charismatic and funny as possible. These are qualities that the extraordinary Eleanor Catton has in spades.’

Eleanor Catton's The Rehearsal was long-listed for the prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction in 2010, honouring female authors in the English language. It also won the Amazon.ca First Novel award 2011.

She was a 2010 Arts Foundation New Generation Award recipient. Catton was awarded the 2012 University of Auckland Residency at the Michael King Writers' Centre.

Eleanor Catton's second novel The Luminaries was published by Victoria University Press and Granta in 2013, and won the prestigious 2013 Man Booker Prize.